My Political Journey

When the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and went into effect on July 1, 1971, just four days before my twenty-sixth birthday, I’d already been a registered voter for five years, having voted in two presidential elections and one mid-term. I’d never actually been to a polling place, because I joined the army when I was seventeen, and was never in my home state of Texas for an election. So, I’d been submitting absentee ballots.

Local elections were easy for me to decide. East Texas was, and as far as I know still is, solidly Democratic, and when I was a kid growing up in the piney woods of that region, the Democrats were the guys wearing sheets and hoods and burning crosses—or at least, some of them were. So, unless I knew a Democratic candidate personally, which is not difficult to do when you come from a county with a population of less than 12,000, I either voted for the Republican, or left that part of the ballot blank.

At the national level I voted mainly for Republicans, figuring the Party of Lincoln had my interests at heart; sort of. Of course, if I’d been old enough to vote I would have voted for John F. Kennedy, and when Jimmy Carter ran against Ronald Reagan, I left that block blank. If I’d known at the time what I later learned, I would’ve voted for Carter.

For a long time, though, I self-identified as a Republican because of what I thought I knew about the Republican Party. Gradually, however, reality penetrated my thick East Texas skull. I was serving in Germany during the 1964 election, when Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater played the Southern Strategy during the primary, and was, unfortunately, unaware of it.

Later, though, when Nixon reformed that strategy, and took it a step further by appealing to the ‘Silent Majority,’ my eyes were opened wide. I discovered that a lot of Republicans were as racist as I’d always imagined most Democrats to be.

I’d already been confused with Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, and JFK’s successor after his assassination, championed and then pushed through congress, a civil rights and voting rights bill that infuriated a lot of the southern Democrats, causing them to defect to Nixon’s Republican Party.

At that point, though, I couldn’t purge those robes and burning crosses from my mind, so I began calling myself an Independent; my way of saying, ‘a pox on both their houses, since I’m not welcome in either one.’

Things stayed pretty much that way until Bill Clinton, an Arkansas Democrat, ran for and won the presidency. Damn! How was it that another southern Democrat seemed to be able to treat all people equal? I began to waver and found myself looking more closely at Democratic candidates in national elections. I retired from the army and joined the Foreign Service in 1982 and had a lot of opportunities to meet some of these guys in person, and what I learned stunned me. There were some Democrats who were racist, homophobic misogynists, and some Republicans who, despite leaning to the right, had compassion (the Bush family comes to mind). But, the two parties had taken entirely different roads. The Republicans had gone so far right they were off the map, while the Democrats dithered on the left, but not all that far from the center. The Republicans seemed to be in the pockets of big industry, and under the thumb of the far, far right, and the Democrats were eating from labor’s lunch buckets. Being more of a centrist, I still clung to my Independent label.

Then, a miracle happened. Young, urban, intellectual voters came out in droves and put a black man, a Democrat, in the Oval Office, not once, but twice, and the Republicans pulled off the gloves and did everything they could to make him fail. They failed to do that, but since the 2016 election, the Republican incumbent has been trying to pull an old Soviet trick and erase him and his achievements from the history books.

There’s one thing about me that must be understood at this point; I have always hated bullies. Despite twenty years in the army, I’m a pacifist at heart, but bullies make me want to fight.

So, during Barack Obama’s first term, I went to my local election office and registered as a Democrat

I guess that makes me a political animal now, but unlike many Democrats I know, I still have friends who are Republican—and, not a few relatives. We still get along; we just avoid talking about politics, religion and sex, flash points for many Republicans, and topics I’d always been taught to avoid anyway.

But, I’ve learned that maintaining such cross-party relationships is not an easy thing to do. It’s not big thing for me because I don’t pay attention to detractors, but the Republican friends of my Republican friends probably wonder how they can continue to interact with me, not only a Democrat, but an apostate to boot. I think, though, that these particular friends are true friends, because they’ve not abandoned our relationship. A few of my false friends did after the first election when they found out I’d gone to the dark side.

That is my political journey, one that continues, and I continue to hope that one day things will go back to a semblance of the way they used to be when hands could reach across the aisle in friendship and cooperation, and people could disagree without being so darned disagreeable.

I just hope I live long enough to see that day arrive.